November 2, 2006

Frontier of terror

The Pakistan-Afghanistan border is awash with arms and drugs – and traces of Osama bin Laden as Eric Ellis in Peshawar discovers

A HOTEL’S CONCIERGE CAN TELL one a lot about the clientele. And the greeting to guests at Peshawar’s notionally five-star Pearl Continental Hotel says volumes about this wild Pakistani frontier on the “war on terror.”

“The carrying of firearms in the premises is prohibited,” the notice says in English and the national language, Urdu.

Washington and its allies in Canberra and London would be thrilled if the sign was also in Arabic and Farsi, which might go some small way to checking insurgencies being fought several borders away. The hotel charges $400 a night for filthy rooms, but there’s no shortage of clientele.

Just 20km from the fabled Khyber Pass to Afghanistan, the lawless capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province is an arms smugglers’ mecca and the array of “pieces” – some discreetly concealed, many not – evident in the hotel’s buzzing coffee lounge suggests that its house rules need enforcement. Magnificently moustachioed Pathan nabobs contemptuously sweep through the hotel’s permanently bleeping security screen, the folds of their shalwar-kameez bulging as they rush to business meetings with robed associates from parts not round here.

Peshawar seems comfortable with conflict, and the region knows how to profit from it. The no-go tribal areas that surround here and probably host al-Qaeda’s jihadis are notorious for deadly blood feuds that can last for decades. Some 40km south is the Afridi clan’s infamous Darra Adam Khel, a town where youths toil in myriad sweatshops making knock-off Kalashnikovs and any ordnance one might wish to order, no questions asked. Darra has been making weapons for 120 years but it boomed during the 1980s, when Peshawaris speak nostalgically of the last time they profited from the centre of an American war, the proxy one the US and its allies fought against the Soviets, occupying Afghanistan just 60km away

The Pakistan-Afghanistan border is awash with arms and drugs – and traces of Osama bin Laden. Then, as now, Peshawar’s Smuggler’s Bazaar bursts with weapons, intrigues and cash as Washington poured spooks and materiel into the city. The US Consulate was – and is again – one of the busiest offices in town. Much of Afghanistan’s heroin poppy output also gets laundered through here. The city again buzzes with activity, thanks to a certain Saudi. Ask those fresh-faced “tourists” in the American Club where Osama bin Laden is and they’ll say he moves between the Waziristan hills south-west of here and south to the Baluchi deserts around Quetta. And most likely with Islamabad’s knowledge if not its patronage.

But eager to present a united pro-western stand, General Pervez Musharraf’s government vehemently disagrees and says it is the biggest victim of Ladenist terror. But Pakistanis also know that war has its economic upside, and this country has been a huge winner from Osama’s sudden appearance in the international neurosis.

Before 9/11, Pakistan was a pariah, Musharraf was initially condemned as a military dictator who destroyed democracy. Now he is feted in western salons as its new best friend. Since the 2001 attacks, Islamabad has enjoyed major concessions from a panicked West desperate to have nuclear Pakistan proverbially pissing inside its anti-terror tent rather than on it. After 9/11, Washington’s 12- year-old embargo on Pakistan’s upgrading of its air force with a squadron of F-16 fighters was lifted. Billions in foreign debt have been rescheduled. Pakistan’s post 9/11 breaks have seen its economy boom, after it was close to collapse in 2000-2001. Foreign reserves that totalled $900m then now are $15bn, servicing lower foreign debt. Economic growth in 2005 of 8.4% was second only to China in Asia In the year before 9/11, it was just 1.5%.

In an effort to be user-friendly to the West, Pakistan’s various mayors have established city-twinning relationships. Lahore recently twinned with Scotland’s Glasgow and Peshawaris say they see Perth as a possible Australian partner. But the only relationship evident now seems to be a suicide pact with Kabul and Baghdad. Five bombs were timed to explode last week in Peshawar’s bazaar at the evening iftar, the meal that daily breaks the fast during Ramadan. Had they exploded as planned, the carnage would have been devastating. In the end it was bad enough; one bomb went off, killing nine of the faithful. Peshawar took it in its stride.

But it’s still a close run thing. Pakistan’s 9/11 dividend isn’t trickling down as Musharraf would like, and most Pakistanis struggle by on $1 a day. The author Salman Rushdie last week bid Musharraf a healthy longevity because he views Pakistan as an “assassination away from having fanatics in charge of a functioning nuclear weapon”. Rushdie is articulating a widely held axiom held by diplomats in Islamabad that the old cliche about the Soviet Union, that it was “Burkina Faso with nukes”, is actually true about Pakistan, with Islamist fanatics and an impoverished flock lurking in the not-toodistant background.